What's Prison Like in Rwanda? Thailand? Norway?

As one who has spent more than 20 years as a volunteer teacher in prison, I wanted to read Baz Dreisinger's Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World. Dr. Dreisinger is an Associate Professor in the English Department of John Jay

College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and the founder and Academic Director of the Prison-to-College Pipeline program, which helps incarcerated men and women obtain college degrees. Before talking about the book, however, let me lay a little pipe.

We Americans lock people away in prison for four reasons: (1) as punishment for a criminal act; (2) to remove dangerous people from society; (3) to deter others from doing the same thing; (4) as an opportunity to change—to correct—criminal/anti-social behavior. Spelling these out, of course, raises all kinds of questions. How much punishment is appropriate? Is losing one's freedom enough punishment? Does prison—even long mandatory minimum sentences—deter crime? (One student told me that the certainty of being caught deters crime, not a long sentence.) Is it even possible to correct a person's behavior? We call them correctional institutions, but does anyone think they correct anything?

With a background as a "white English professor specializing in African-American cultural studies, a Caribbean carnival lover who is also a prison educator and criminal justice activist, a freelance producer for National Public Radio, [and] an agnostic New York Jew," Dreisinger took two years to visit prisons in Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, Jamaica, Thailand, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Norway, comparing and contrasting their prisons and answers to the questions above to America's answers. She visited prisons and met with prisoners, staff and officials, criminal justice advocates, and more.

The result is a number of fascinating snapshots of very different institutions, culture-bound in some ways, American-influenced in others. For example, "Throughout the colonial world . . . prisons served the aims of whites, extorting money by the way of bribes to stay out of prison and obtaining free labor from prisoners for cotton production . . . colonial powers adroitly manufactured reasons to put bodies behind bars." (So that could be reason (5) for locking people away: Obtain cheap labor.)

Perhaps examples of American-influence are drug laws. "Across the globe, draconian drug policy is packing prisons. Drug users and traffickers represent more than half of those in federal prison in the United States and Mexico, a quarter of all those in prison in Spain, and one-fifth entering prison in Japan; in Malaysia they constitute more than half of the nine hundred incarcerated people awaiting execution. And these are mainly small-time users, more than 83 percent of them, worldwide, convicted of possession."

But while much of the news is grim (don't get arrested for drug possession in Singapore), it's not all dire. It turns out that, given the Australian experience, private prisons may not be all bad all the time. Thanks to Thailand's princess, the country's prisons for women are becoming less oppressive. Norway is showing the world its commitment to corrections over punishment. Whether the positive lessons can—or should—be replicated elsewhere remains in my mind an open question.

I thoroughly enjoyed Incarceration Nations for the insights Dreisinger gives into foreign prisons. I would have enjoyed it more with end notes and an index. It does have an extensive bibliography, but, buff that I am, I would like to be able to look up the original studies she cites. Nevertheless, I recommend the book to anyone interested in incarceration here and elsewhere in the world. 

Who Should Be in the American Writers Museum?

Plans for the American Writers Museum

The American Writers Museum plans open in March 2017 in Chicago, a block north of Millennium Park on Michigan Avenue. According to the website its mission is "to engage the public in celebrating American writers and exploring their influence on our history, our identity, our culture, and our daily lives.

"The American Writers Museum will:

• Educate the public about American writers – past and present
• Engage visitors to the Museum in exploring the many exciting worlds created by the spoken and written word
• Enrich and deepen appreciation for good writing in all its forms
• Inspire visitors to discover, or rediscover, a love of reading and writing

"Through innovative and dynamic state-of-the-art exhibitions, as well as compelling programming, the American Writers Museum will educate, enrich, provoke, and inspire the public."

It sounds great, and I was wondering who all will be included. Considering that the Library of America has already published almost 300 volumes of the works of American writers, including several anthologies assembling several authors, I wonder who will be included, and who may be overlooked. Clarence Budington Kelland? Erskine Caldwell? Robert Riskin? Edna St. Vincent Millay?

Who do you think should be included in the American Writers Museum? And why?

Why you make friends with librarians

I have the impression from the comments I read on websites for writers that many self-published authors do not fully appreciate a basic marketing law: Consumers must first be aware a product exists before they can consider buying it. This is why we have press releases, reviews, advertising, interviews—anything to get the word out.

And you want to get the word out to people who buy and read books. Independent bookstores have always been a wonderful source of getting the word out. There was a time (perhaps mythical, perhaps real) when the bookstore owner and clerks knew their customers' interests and preferences well enough to suggest new titles. (Amazon is trying to accomplish the same thing with its "Customers who bought this item also bought" lists.)

Libraries are also filled with people who read books—and, according to Library Journal—50 percent of the people who start an e-book they've downloaded from their library actually buy the book. I have been giving my book to libraries where (a) I have a relationship and (b) the library is willing to put the book into the circulating collection, which is not always. However, in some cases, the librarian has actually put the book on display where, as in the display illustrated here, it was immediately checked out.

In the best of all possible worlds, the patron read Death in a Family Business and liked it enough to recommend it to friends and acquaintances and, like ripples in a pond, the friends told friends and so the word got out.

The Best Book Covers of 2015

Matt Dorfman, the art director of The New York Times Book Review, has chosen what he feels are the best covers of 2015.  His brief introduction to the dozen covers makes a couple interesing points: "When considering the book as a whole, I prefer that the interiors contain answers and the covers ask questions. To the extent that my favorite reading experiences empower me to confront uncomfortable truths and honest answers about people, societies and the greater universe, the covers that lure me into the pages often do so by posing questions that I don’t want to ignore."

One of the best covers of 2015

He also notes that today books and their covers are having to compete for attention with everything from Jumbotrons to smart phones to wristwatches. The article reproduces the covers that made him "stop, stare and ask aloud to no one in particular what the cover means, only to turn to the first page and then the following and then the one after that and onward.'

Making something of it

I attend a writer's workshop sponsored by a local library and led by a writer friend. Why, you ask, do you attend a workshop when you have ghostwritten twenty-one business books and published three novels? For what do you need a workshop?

I do not believe I need a workshop. I do believe I can still learn something, that I can be stimulated to try something new. One of the new things I tried is an exercise called "Make Something of It."

Take a list of random phrases and turn them into sentences in a poem, a story, an essay. In each case, the subject and verb must appear in which they appear in the list. Their relationship must remain the same and they must appear in the order in which they are listed. Beyond that you are invited to decorate or elaborate upon the sentence as you will. Can you make something of the following?

Springtime mattered.
Sophie recoiled.
The twins bled.
The Volkswagen lurched.
The mountains glowed.
The children wept.
Wayne stole.
Alice tripped.
Run Sue.
Bruce felt down.
Scott breathed.
Darkness fell.

Not easy, is it? Here—without boring you about my struggle to hammer the phrases into some semblance of sense and coherence—is what I was able to come up with:

Springtime mattered because without it
We perish in the boundless ice.
Sophie recoiled at the vision
Of winter interminable.
As the twins bled, their feet raw,
And the Volkswagen lurched
Through slushy ruts,
The mountains glowed, indifferent,
While the children wept in the dusk.

Wayne stole kindling, firewood.
Alice tripped at the threshold.
Run, Sue, run! Fetch a burning ember!
Bruce felt down at the sight of living flame.
Scott breathed wood smoke, perfume
In the warming air.
Darkness fell.

Good luck coming up with your own version.

The story begins with 31 wonderful stories by Tobias Wolff

I tell people who tell me they want to write to do two things:

(1) Write something every day.

(2) Read the best stuff you can get your hands on. Our story begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff is one of the best things I've gotten my hands on recently.

The book published in 2008, contains 21 stories from earlier collections, plus 10 new

stories. In his author's note, Wolff asked himself about this book: "Should I present my stories, of whatever vintage [some are 30 years old], in their original form? Or should I allow myself the liberty of revisiting them here and there?"

I am sure every writer, looking at earlier work, sees ways to improve, to tinker, to touch up. While there is a good argument for leaving the published text alone, there is, I believe, a better one to edit. "The truth is that I have never regarded my stories as sacred texts," writes Woolf. "If I see a clumsy or superfluous passage, so will you, and why should I throw you out of the story with an irritation I could have prevented? Where I have felt the need for something better I have answered the need as best I can, for now."

Because Woolf wrote the 31 stories over a 30-year period, they cover an enormous range of subjects, themes, and settings. We are in the peacetime Army, in prep school, teaching college, married, single, a child. "For two days now, Miller has been standing in the rain with the rest of Bravo Company, waiting for some men from another company to blunder down the logging road where Bravo waits in ambush."  So begins "The Other Miller" putting the reader into a muddy foxhole with Miller.

"'A prep school in March is like a ship in the doldrums.' Our history master said this, as if to himself, while we were waiting for the bell to ring after class." So beings "Smorgasbord" putting the reader into the head of a prep student narrator.

"The number 64 bus stops at St. Peter's, so it's always crammed with pilgrims or suckers, depending on your pont of view—a happy hunting ground for pickpockets. Mallon was not a pilgrim, or by his own reckoning a sucker." So begins "The Benefit of the Doubt," in which Mallon, in Rome, indulges the Gypsy who has attempted to pick his pocket.

Although Wolff is widely anthologized, I recognized only one story, "A White Bible," perhaps because I read it in Best American Short Stories; it is unforgettable. A female schoolteacher is accosted at her car and forced to drive to a remote spot by a man who turns out to be a student's father. The confrontation between a single American woman who has actually had an alcoholic drink on a Friday after work and a puritanical immigrant Islamic man who only wants the best for his son is powerful, convincing, and moving.

All I can say is, see if you can get your hands on a copy of Our story begins.

A mystery set in the capital of Mali

White Leopard by Laurent Guillaume, hard-boiled, noir mystery, is interesting on several levels: It is set in Mali, about which I suspect few American reader know much; I certainly don't. Its narrator is Souleymane Camara, called Solo, a half-African/half-French ex-cop

private detective. In France, he was regarded as black; in Mali, he's regarded as white. Solo is the quixotic figure: a (mostly) just man seeking justice in a corrupt world.

The book begins stereotypically with a beautiful dame, a French lawyer, showing up in Solo's office with a problem she wants him to solve. Her younger sister has been arrested as a drug mule. Solo needs to get her out of prison. No problem—or no big problem. Solo knows who to bribe and the sister is released.

Then the sister's mutilated body is pulled out of the river, and shortly after two exceptionally brutal thugs chop off the hand of Solo's elderly gardinier, which is what "Bamako residents call someone who tends the grounds and garden." They do it to warn off Solo, the old man dies, and, needless to say, Solo is not warned off. By the book's end, Solo has found himself involved in an international drug trafficking ring, a gay Ukrainian crook who's not what he seems, an upcountry gold mine, a shore-side standoff between the military and himself, and more.

White Leopard, translated gracefully from the French by Sophie Weiner, is Guillaume's first book to be published in English. He is apparently writing from the inside. A former police officer, he worked on anti-gang, narcotics, and financial crimes. He also served on a number of international cooperation missions, including one as a police adviser in Mali, particularly for issues related to drug trafficking. He has six thrillers published in France (French readers: take note).

I said above I know nothing about Mali, but now I know something: "Mali was once the French Sudan, and even though it has been an independent nation for a half century, vestiges of French rule still remain." A painless way to assimilate geopolitical information. And while Mali may be a third world country, technology thrives: "It took me a good ten minutes to find Ronny's magnetic GPS tracker underneath the engine block [of my Land Cruiser]. I pulled it off and examined the casing. It had a cable with a male USB  port. I hooked it up to my computer and quickly figured out how to download the correct application. Fifteen minutes later, the GPS's location showed up on Google Earth. Satisfied, I charged the battery before going to bed."

While White Leopard contains some grisly violence, I never felt the bloodshed was gratuitous or overdone. Solo operates in a violent and corrupt milieu. Readers who would enjoy a safe visit to that world as they watch Solo untangle the mystery surrounding the sister's death will enjoy White Leopard.

Here I am, the interviewer as interviewee

Nancy Christie, fellow member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, is a full-time professional writer, whose passion is for fiction. In addition to her two e-books, Annabelle and Alice in Wonderland, her short stories can be found in literary publications such as Hypertext, Full of Crow, Fiction365, Red Fez, Wanderings, The Chaffin Journal and Xtreme. In addition, she maintains an interesting blog: "One one One: Insights into the Writer's Life" where she interviews writers in unusual depth. Recently, she interviewed me.

Because Christie herself is a writer, she asks interesting questions about a writer's background, writing experience, writing process and more. The interviews are long, so long she posts them in two parts. But because they are so long and because interviewees are free to respond at length they are unusually insightful. I found the experience of answering her questions both challenging and stimulating.

For example, she asks, "What does the act of writing bring into your life? Why do you want to write?" I was tempted to give the answer Victoria Page gives to a similar question in the movie The Red Shoes: "Why do you want to live?" But that begs the question.

More good questions that made me think: "What stimulates your creativity or serves as a writing inspiration? . . . What part of the writing process do you enjoy the most? The least? . . . What is the message of your book? What do you want readers to come away with after they read your book? . . . Who has inspired you — either at a personal level or as a writer?"

These are not easy questions, and I'm glad I didn't have to answer them off the top of my head but had a chance to think about them and write answers. That might mean the interview lost a certain spontaneity, but surely gained some depth. All in all, I found it a thought-provoking experience.

In "Birds of America" the language soars

Now that I've read (and written about) Stanley Fish on sentences, I've been thinking about my sentences and have become sensitive to other writers' sentences. Fish talks about the

importance of first sentences, and I've just finished reading a short story collection that is a model of how to write a first sentence that pulls the reader into the story.

—In her last picture, the camera had lingered at the hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn't her hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing.

—It was a fear greater than death, according to the magazines.

—I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom.

—When Olena was a little girl, she had called them lie-berries—a fibbing fruit, a story store—and now she had a job in one.

—Her mother had given her the name Agnes, believing that a good-looking woman was even more striking when her name was a homely one.

Five first sentences from the first five stories in Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. All different, all engaging. Indeed, I imagine that one of the challenges of writing so well at the sentence level is that readers will pay more attention to the writing than to the story. It may be a problem for Moore because more than once I was stopped by an absolutely lovely sentence, a perfect metaphor and briefly pulled out of the story.

But for Moore, I'll let it pass. It's a little like complaining that the meal was so delicious I couldn't eat.

While there are certain repeating themes in these dozen stories—people who are lost, couples who find it hard to live together, families in crisis—there is also lightness and humor. A woman who mourns the death of her cat goes through the five stages of grief: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage. And while I responded more to some stories than others, that I think is the nature of a story collection and another reader will find a story that did not engage me to be the best in the book.

I tell aspiring writers to read the best stuff they can get their hands on. One cannot do better than study Birds of America for its range, for its language, for its structures.

What's inside the blackman's coffin?

Faithful readers of this blog—both of you—know that I respond positively to mysteries that are (a) plausible, (b) have interesting characters, and (c) are set in recognizable locales. Blackman's Coffin by Mark de Castrique meets all three criterion.

You'll have to take my word for it that the mystery is plausible because to discuss the plot in any detail would be to give too much away.

The main character, however, is both original and sympathetic. Sam Blackburn, a Chief Warrant Officer in the US Army's Criminal Investigation Detachment, has his leg blown off in Iraq and is recovering in a North Carolina V.A. Hospital. Tikima Robertson, a former Marine, visits him in Chapter 1 and offers to help him find a place to live in Asheville and a job with her employer Armitage Security Services. Surprisingly (to Sam) she never returns.

When Sam is out of the hospital, he tries to connect with Tikima at Armitage. She was murdered the morning she'd visited Sam. It's now three weeks later, the police have no suspects, and it's becoming a cold case. After a memorial service for Tikima, Sam receives a phone call from an agitated Nakayla Robertson, Tikima's younger sister. Someone has broken into Tikima's apartment during the service but appeared to take nothing. On the other hand, the burglar may not have recognized the significance of something Tikima had left on a table.

Before Blackman's Coffin ends, the reader has learned something about Thomas "Look Homeward Angel" Wolfe and the brother who stayed behind in Asheville, the Biltmore estate (with the biggest private home in the United States), and North Carolina geology. Because de Castrique grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina he knows the landscape and perhaps because this is his fifth mystery he knows how to sketch a character and evoke a scene.

Blackman's Coffin is interesting for the exchange between Sam, the white, one-legged, former Army detective, and Nakayla, the black insurance investigator. de Castrique also manages to write convincingly what seems to be a 60-year-old journal, an early, unpublished work by Thomas Wolfe. The journal says more than appears on the surface and while Sam may have an artificial leg, the IED in Iraq did not destroy his sharp-wittedness.

Who do you trust to critique your writing?

It seems to be two problems with the comments you receive about your writing: One is to not take it seriously, to, for example, attribute maliciousness or ignorance to person giving the critique. The other problem is to accept the comments wholeheartedly, to assume the reader knows better than you.

The Writer's Circle has an excellent piece on taking feedback on your writing and when to trust it. It is short, to the point, and available at:

http://writerscircle.com/how-to-take-feedback-and-trust-it-too/?utm_source=twc-twcfan&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_term=100115&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=how-to-take-feedback-and-trust-it-too&origin=twc_twcfan_social_fb_link_how-to-take-feedback-and-trust-it-too_100115

You too can write better sentences!

How to write a sentence. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? There, I've just written two. In the second, I omitted the subject which should probably be "It"; that is, "It sounds simple . . . ." This "It" standing for "How to write a sentence," the second "it" standing in for "sound simple."

As a native English speaker, I can crank out sentences and analyses like these all day long. Why would I want to read Stanley Fish's thin book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One?

Because he will make me—and you—think about sentences, which are, after all, basic to the writer's trade. For example, what is a sentence? Fish points out that writing guides offer answers: "A sentence is a complete thought." "A sentence contains a subject or a predicate." "Sentences consist of one or more clauses that bear certain relationships to one another." He says that "far from being transparent and inclusive, these declarations come wrapped in a fog; they seem to skate on their own surface and simply don't go deep enough."

Okay, professor, what does go deeper? "Well, my bottom line can be summarized in two statements: (1) a sentence is an organization of items in the world; and (2) a sentence is a structure of logical relationships." A random list of items, for example, is not a sentence. He quotes Anthony Burgess: "And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning." In Fish's formula, "Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation."

He discusses sentence form and how to turn a list of words into a sentence, using the Noam Chomsky example: "furiously sleep ideas green colorless" which can be turned into something meaningful (or more meaningful) as "colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which could be a line of poetry. The question one has to ask oneself when writing a sentence is "What am I trying to do?"

"It is often said," he writes, "that the job of language is to report or reflect or mirror reality, but the power of language is greater and more dangerous than that; it shapes reality, not of course in the literal sense—the world is one thing, words another—but in the sense that the order imposed on a piece of the world by a sentence is only one among innumerable possible orders." And every time you revise a sentence, add a modifier, delete a clause, change a tense you've changed that "reality."

Once Fish has discussed sentences generally, he spends three chapters describing the subordinating style, the additive style, and the satiric style of sentences with examples. Here is a sample of the satiric style.  J. L. Austin cautioning readers not to be impatient with the slow unfolding of his argument: "And we must at all costs avoid over-simplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation."

With practical suggestions of how to form an infinite number of sentences using a relatively few forms, Fish offers chapters on first sentences—"One day Karen DeCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca" (Elmore Leonard)—and last—"He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance" (Mary Shelley). Wonderful stuff for any writer who is struggling to start a piece or finish one.

The last chapter, "Sentences That Are About Themselves (Aren't They All?)" summarizes and extends the discussion to works like Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier in which the narrator in telling one story is, as the reader comes to realize, unconsciously telling another story entirely.

Every serious writer should keep How to Write a Sentence on the bookshelf to take down every year or so and read once again.  

Hannah Ives solves a murder without supernatural help

Marcia Talley has created an interesting character in Hannah Ives. She's a woman of a certain age (as they say), happily married, curious and resourceful. She is not a detective, however, and not a former cop, and I was particularly interested in how Talley, in All Things Undying. was able to create a plausible and satisfying murder mystery with virtually no police involvement. In this ninth Hannah Ives mystery, Hannah and her husband Paul are vacationing for three weeks in Dartmouth, Devon, England. They have good friends locally so they are more than tourists, less than residents.

The action begins when a stranger stops Hannah on the street to give her a message from her long-dead mother. The medium is an American medium Susan Parker, host of a popular UK television show. "Your mother's apologizing. She says she's sorry for not being around when you needed her." Hannah is half-convinced by Susan's recital (and Paul is a thoroughgoing skeptic), and agrees to a private reading the morning after a live performance with audience participation. Before this can take place, however, a hit-and-run driver deliberately runs down and kills Susan. That's Mystery Number One.

Mystery Number Two is what happened locally in 1944. The US Military cleared several square miles of coastline to practice the Normandy landings. Villages were emptied, farmers had to leave their farms. On April 28, 1944, German subs torpedoed two LSTs each carrying more than a thousand men; hundreds of GIs died and not all the bodies washed ashore. An American woman, born shortly after her father had been killed, has come to Dartmouth to find his remains. If Susan Parker can receive messages from the dead, perhaps the dead father will tell her what happened.

So Talley combines an historic tragedy with local culture, the supernatural (or is it) with actual death. And Hannah is in the middle of it all: "There I was, staring through the window of Mullin's Bakery at plain, ordinary everyday pork pasties while getting messages from my dead mother concerning my father's sex life."

Talley does not have to switch to another point of view to convey information to the reader. She is also able to write dialogue that sounds English without funny spellings; for example, " . . . the house is a tip" . . . "you'll need some wellies" . . .  "my solicitor think that since it's a cash deal, and there's no chain of sales, we can go to completion on the same day."

All Things Undying is satisfying on several levels. Hannah is able to tell the entire story in her own words. The book skillfully and convincingly weaves together actual history with plausible mystery. The murderer has good reasons for the killing. The issue of whether the dead can communicate somehow with the living is left open. And the scenes of Dartmouth made me want to make a reservation in one of the local B&Bs.

How to find reviewers for independently-published books

Do reviews sell books? I'm sure they do not sell as many books as word-of-mouth—a friend's recommendation—but they are more effective than advertising. Book reviews are just one of those things an author has to do to spread the word, and if you are publishing your book independently, few if any media outlets—The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, national magazines etc.—will review your book as a matter of economics and principle. It is, I suspect, just too expensive to try to identify the single jewel in the mountain of self-published pulp that is published every day. So what are we self-published authors to do?

You can pay for a review. A Kirkus Indie reviewer will evaluate your book for $425. You cannot control the review, and if you don't like what it says you can refuse to have it printed in the publication. A former Kirkus reviewer writing in Poets & Writers said that about three quarters of the authors she reviewed elected not to publish.

You can pay a service to contact reviewers for you. Word Slinger Publicity, for example, will "create a book review request, the single most important press release for authors, with our custom HTML template and your book information." Once you approve the release, "we send out your targeted press release to thousands of book reviewers using our own lists and in your genre." All this and more for $150.

Or you can invest time instead of money. Publishers Weekly's booklife now accepts free submissions. However, the website cautions that while "we want to give your book its best chance for a review. . . we can’t review every book that’s submitted." Nevertheless, I believe it's worth the cost of a couple books and postage for the possibility of a review.

Simon Royle maintains an exceptionally useful website, The Indie View, a compilation of 275 reviewers who review independently-published books. These reviewers do not charge for their reviews (or they're thrown off the list), and the listings indicate what exactly the individual reviewers want to see: i.e., "All except non-fiction and erotic fiction;" "non-fiction sports books;" "mostly chick lit-ish and romantic comedy books;" "paranormal romance/urban fantasy," and more and more and more.

As an author, I looked at the websites of all reviewers who seem interested in my genre and followed their instructions for consideration exactly. Start with a query letter that includes a synopsis of the book, a brief bio, and where the book is available. You have to be prepared to send a .mobi file (the Kindle system), or a PDF, or the book itself—it depends on the reviewer. Some want to know your Goodreads address, some are backed up and not currently accepting books, others are backed up but will allow your book to get in line.

Sending a query of course does not guarantee that a reviewer will want to see your book. That a reviewer sees your book of course does not guarantee a review will follow. And of course, you have no control over a reviewer's opinion. (Although, interestingly, many of the reviewers I approached say they will simply not finish a book or post a review if they find it offensive or badly written or edited or all three.)

All this takes time. It is worth it? I have to believe it is or I wouldn't do it. Will it sell books? Who knows? Certainly a positive review cannot hurt. 

Discussion questions: One more tool for your book

Apparently with the growth of book clubs, publishers realized that book discussion questions could be a tool to help readers think and talk about a book. I think that if publishers think book discussion questions are a good idea, I should think about them. And I've not only thought about them, I've had them written for all three of my novels. Indeed, I posted questions for the brand new book yesterday, and if you click on the button above this entry, you can find them.

I had no idea whether the questions for the earlier novels were used or useful. No reader has ever written to say, "Boy, your discussion questions really enriched my experience of your book." But thanks to Blogspot, I can track page views, and I've been interested to see how many page views the discussion questions for Getting Oriented and The Girl in the Photo have accumulated. I would like to think that most of those visitors have read about the book, read the sample chapter, read the questions and bought the book and thereby had the complete experience. I would like to think that, but I know better.

Nevertheless, I believe discussion questions are a valuable adjunct to a book. They are not easy to write. I have not written mine because, I suspect, I am too close to the book. If you can write them, do so. If you cannot, find a careful, thoughtful reader who can. They are one more tool in your box, one more arrow in your quiver, one more . . .  But you know what I mean.

My experience with Kindle Scout

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, Kindle Scout is an opportunity for writers to receive a $1,500 advance and have their books electronically published by Kindle Press. I learned of the program just as I was about to independently publish my mystery, Death in a Family Business, and felt I had nothing to lose by participating.

I uploaded my cover, text, my carefully crafted book description, and answers to three questions about the book. (You may still be able to see my entry here, although my campaign ended.) Once you've uploaded your book, you have 30 days to get as many relatives, friends, and strangers to nominate it as possible. I wrote everyone I knew, posted on LinkedIn, on Facebook, and asked for nominations.

The book was not selected. I don't know why. Not enough nominations? A weak cover? First chapters too slow? The Kindle staff's judgement of its potential? An Amazon algorithm that forecasts sales? Who knows?

I do know that my book was Hot & Trending 18 percent of the time it was up (130 hours out of 720) because after the campaign Kindle Scout gave me access to the statistics with two attractive charts:

Kindle did not, however, tell me how the statistics relate to their decision whether to publish the book. I do know that 214 page views came from external sources; 356 from Kindle Scout, but how many of those Scout page views turned into nominations? That is, I am sure that my relatives and friends nominated my book, but how many Scouters read the blurb, scanned the first couple chapters, and then took a pass? I have no idea. And would it make any difference in the selection?

Nevertheless, I believe the Kindle Scout program is worth a writer's consideration. It costs nothing to enter. Whether a book is selected or no, what you have to do amounts to a pre-publishing publicity campaign—a good thing. If you are not selected and go ahead and publish on Createspace (another Amazon company) as I have done, Kindle notifies everyone the book is available. If people buy, read, and review my book, that would be even a better thing.

And now for another point of view . . .

A good friend passed along Us by David Nicholls, saying she thought I would enjoy it. She knows my taste. The book is laugh-out-loud hilarious, interestingly constructed, and ultimately satisfying. I wouldn't go as far as the Independent's blurb on the back cover ("A perfect book"), but I recommend it for the story and for the way Nicholls tells it. I'm not alone. Other readers enjoyed Us. At this writing, the novel has something like 240 five-star reviews on Amazon. Which made me wonder about the opinions of the handful of people who gave it one or two stars. Did they read the same book?

One reader wrote, "I found this book to be long [almost 400 pages] and boring and the main character to be pathetic."

And not only the main character. Another disappointed reader asked, "It is not enough to have a son raised without discipline and as a result no respect for himself or anyone around him? Add to it a wife who has no respect for her husband and constantly teams up with their son to demean him . . . "

A similar opinion: "I found the main characters unrealistic, particularly the husband. Nobody can be passive and agreeable . . . "

One more: "Slow-moving anti-capitalism and anti-child discipline novel written by a disgruntled Brit. Waste of time and money, and highly over-rated by the media." Oh, sure; blame the media.

I like to read Amazon's one- and two-star reviews because (a) you can be pretty sure that in their way they're objective; the author's friends didn't write them, and (b) these people say what they truly think: "Boring writing. Boring protagonist. Couldn't wait to finish this book so that it was over."

As a response to all this negativity, let me give you a few examples of why I thoroughly enjoyed Us. We are at a vegetarian buffet in Amsterdam with the narrator, Douglas; his wife, Connie; his son, Albie; and taken there by Cat, a girl busker with whom the son has connected: "'Isn't it incredible? Who needs meat?' said Cat who, the last time I saw her, had been stuffing her rucksack with bacon like some crazed taxidermist."

In the course of the novel, the Douglas flashes back to memories of his marriage: "Connie was an undeservedly confident driver and owned a battle-scarred old Volvo with moss growing in the window frames and forest floor of crisp packets, cracked cassette cases and old A-to-Zs. She drove with a kind of belligerent sloppiness, changing the music more often than she changed gear, so that tensions were already quite high as we pulled up outside my family home . . ."

And sprinkled throughout are Nicholls' observations that caused me to stop and reflect: ". . . it occurred to me that perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost." "We think we have independence and imagination, but we have no more freedom to roam than trams on rails." "From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions—fear, desire, anger—serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that it permanently lost . . . "

I am delighted my friend passed Us along to me. I can only recommend it to you.

Kierkegaard and murder, a gratifying combination

Daniel Peters tells his own story in Thom Satterlee's novel, The Stages, which is an interesting story even without the murder of Daniel's boss and former girlfriend—although of course that's the thread that pulls us through the pages.

Daniel is a middle-aged American man who has lived in Copenhagen for twenty years where he works as a translator at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center. An extremely circumscribed life with minimal human contact and a rigid routine suits Daniel who suffers from Asperger's syndrome.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, "Asperger syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder characterized by social impairment, communication difficulties, and restrictive, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior. Asperger syndrome is . . . synonymous with the most highly functioning individuals with ASD. Two core features of autism are: a) social and communication deficits and b) fixated interests and repetitive behaviors.  The social communication deficits in highly functioning persons with Asperger syndrome include lack of the normal back and forth conversation; lack of typical eye contact, body language, and facial expression; and trouble maintaining relationships." It makes Daniel a brilliant translator but hobbles him as a freelance investigator. He cannot tell when someone lying or speaking ironically.

The Stages opens with the funeral of Matte Rassmussan, the director of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center. She's been brutally hacked to death; Daniel had seen her the night of her death; the Copenhagen police have no suspects although they certainly have questions for Daniel. Adding to the mystery, recently-discovered Kierkegaard manuscript has gone missing from the vault where it was stored. Fortunately—or not—Daniel had already translated the contents.

As an amateur translator myself, I was interested in Daniel's description of the work: . . . "[I] pay attention to words, hear what they say and say back what they mean, what they could mean or most likely would mean in English rather than Danish; what the words mean, in some sense, beyond both languages, in another more essential language, which is like a sea I cast into and draw out words—some I throw back, others I keeps; and I do this over and over again in my mind, until whole sentences of the right words are strung together with a rhythm that holds them like a taut wire—and these word-strung wires I place carefully on the lines of my exercise booklet, one after another, down the page and onto the next."

Because of the story Satterlee is telling, the reader learns a great deal about Kierkegaard's life and work, including how to pronounce his name ("Kyerk-ah-gore"). Because of the setting, we learn something about Danish life and culture. For example, "If I have to be the suspect in a murder case, let it be Copenhagen where a senior officer brews fresh strong coffee and offers you sugar from a crystal bowl." Because of Satterlee's skill, we never leave Daniel's point of view, and reading what Daniel does, and why and how does it seems entirely plausible and convincing. I'll second Publishers Weekly's blurb: "A deftly crafted mystery that will leave readers curious and surprised." I was surprised and satisfied.

What's wrong with Times New Roman?

In a discussion I follow about self-publishing and book design, a knowledgeable participant wrote: "But whatever you do, DON'T EVER set a book in Times New Roman or a comic font. . . ."

What's wrong with Times New Roman? She cited three reasons: "First, it's a narrow font, designed to make newspaper columns work better. On the wider page of a book, with the longer line length? It makes your eyes get tired faster." Second, "it makes your book look subtly 'wrong' to those who are less clued-in." Third, "MS Word uses it as a default font, and beginners always use it, because they're used to it. It's acceptable for basic word-processing documents, but not for books. Using it labels you as not well-informed, leading those who can do your book a lot of good (or not) to put the book on the 'ignore' pile."

Ouch. My three novels are set in Times New Roman. Not much I can do about the first two, but I could still change Death in a Family Business type, so I experimented. Here are the results:

 

While the Goudy and Baskerville faces are somewhat more open than Times New Roman, they do not seem different enough to make the effort to change the entire book. 

Bookman, however, is both more open and more readable and if I were starting from scratch I would use it. Unfortunately because it is more open it adds space, and I calculated that it would add enough pages to the existing text file that the cover's spine would no longer fit. I'd have to return to my jacket designer to have it adjusted, which I believe is more expense and trouble than the change is worth. 

Nevertheless, this is one more reason why anyone who plans to publish independently needs solid professional counsel.

The challenges of writing a plausible mystery

This is the week I should learn whether Kindle Press will be publishing my mystery, Death in a Family Business. I have billed the book as "A Tommy Lovell Mystery," intending to continue Tommy's adventures. During the past month, I've been distracted by the Kindle Scout competition and lining up reviewers for the trade paperback edition of the book rather than beginning a new book.

After all, by creating Death in a Family Business I created Tommy Lovell, his father, and two potential love interests. I gave Tommy a back story—dropped out of college, married his college sweetheart and started a restaurant with her, lost the restaurant and the marriage—and I set him in a place and a milieu with which I am comfortable. The challenge is to invent another plausible murder mystery in which Tommy can be enmeshed.

First problem: Who is the murderer and what is his or her motivation? What drove him to kill another human being? Was it deliberate, a spur-of-the moment act, or an accident? In the mysteries I prefer and would prefer to write, the reader can understand and even, possibly, sympathize with the killer.

Second problem: Why are the police baffled? 

Third problem: What can Tommy do that the police cannot? He's not a cop or a detective, so he's limited in what he can reasonably investigate, even by what the police will tell him about an ongoing investigation.

I think I have solutions to some of these challenges, but not all. I suspect that once I know whether Kindle Press is publishing my book, I'll be able to focus on Tommy Lovell's next adventure.

Hot and trending again! What fun!

This morning I posted another request that people nominate Death in a Family Business for the Kindle Press program on LinkedIn where, to my surprise, I am linked to something like 270 people. Some of the must have responded because a minute ago, I was "Hot and Trending," and the book's cover was one of the first site visitors see.

If somehow you haven't been to the site or been able to nominate my book, here's a link to the site:

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/21DVR6I44MV2K

Kindle Scout asks people who nominate a book to sign in to Amazon, a way I suspect to keep authors from stuffing the ballot box.

For those who have nominated my book, many thanks. For those who haven't (and have an Amazon account), I will be eternally grateful if you do.

Donna Leon's non-fiction about Venice

Many of us thoroughly enjoy Donna Leon's mysteries set in Venice and featuring Commissario Guida Brunetti. I've always thought Brunetti was an interesting detective because he's convincing as an Italian man (Leon is an American woman, a New Jersey girl), as a happily-married family man, and as a cop in a milieu very different from Harry Bosch's or Matthew Scudder's. Leon has lived in Venice for thirty years and My Venice and Other Essays is just what the title says it is.

Most of these non-fiction pieces are short, no more than three or four pages. Because they are not dated nor does the book contain any indication where they may have been published previously, they read almost like Leon's private musings about incidents or occasions to vent some spleen or make a point.

The sixteen Venice essays take about fifty pages of the 222-page book. Leon groups the others into five headings: "On Music," "On Mankind and Animals," "On Men," "On America," and "On Books." All the pieces are clear and lively. One might disagree with Leon's opinion, but it's evident what she thinks when, for example, she calls Tosca "a vulgar potboiler I wouldn't today cross the street to hear." (She's a rabid Handel opera fan.)

She can be very funny. One of the Venice essays, "Shit," describes a nuisance with Venetians and their dogs. A woman permitted her tiny white Matlese to empty his bowels directly in front of a man's front door as he happened to be standing in the window drinking his coffee. The dog finished his business, the man came out his door, the woman approached. "Excuse me, Signora, is this your dog?"

Leon writes: "She threw up her hands in offended innocence and said, 'no, of course not.' The man smiled, called to the dog in a gentle voice, and when it came, he picked it up and delicately turned it upside down, then used the fur of its back to brush up the shit. Just as carefully, he set the dog back on its fee, said a polite 'Buon giorno' to the woman and walked away."

As someone who has just written a mystery, I was particularly interested in Leon's penultimate essay, "Suggestions on Writing the Crime Novel," one of the longest in the book. It is worth the price of the book. She begins by pointing out that "the defining element between the good and the great is some inborn genius that is either present or not. Without it, painters or tennis players can be good; with it, they will be great. I see no reason why this should be any different in the world of words, though I realize how uncomfortable the idea makes most people."

Having thereby cleared the ground somewhat, she discusses several practical aspects in writing a novel: point of view; the knowledge, information, and reference of the narrator; the level of the prose; the narrator's ethical standards; the central crime; the novel's scope; and "the reader's feelings toward you as a writer, and toward your characters. The reader has got to feel sympathy for someone in the book." Without feeling sympathy for the victim or the detective or the criminal or someone, why waste a precious few hours reading the book?

Fortunately, while not all the pieces are equally engaging (but then how could they be?), My Venice and Other Essays is a way to spend a few precious hours with a fascinating and stimulating woman.

The authors swap shop talk and meet prospective readers at Avon's Local Author Festival

With a number of other Connecticut writers, I was selected to participate in the Avon public library's Local Author Festival and spent three hours yesterday afternoon in the Author's Tent, meeting and chatting with people who came through the very busy Monday farmer's market in the library's parking lot.

I shared the tent with Patrick Scalisi, another local author I was meeting for the first time. We swapped writer talk—one of the benefits in participating in such an event. He is both dedicated to his writing (he writes for an hour before he goes to work every morning) and is aggressively building his career as a writer. For example, he has been giving talks about writing and publishing in libraries, building a mailing list, and selling books at the ends of those events. I was impressed.

Patrick Scalisi and I, ready to talk up our books at Avon's Local Author Festival

We did not talk much about our writing except to the people who stopped by to chat. Rather, we talked about the challenges of building a career, getting published, independent publishers versus self-publishing or commercial publishers, and promotion and publicity.

Another benefit of participating in something like a Local Author Festival is the opportunity to talk with people, readers and otherwise, about books, about reading, and, of course, about one's own work. This is a situation where the author needs a polished elevator speech, the two-minute (or shorter) description of a book that can engage the prospective reader's interest.

I do not believe you can "sell" a book. If a person does not read mysteries, nothing I can say about Death in a Family Business is going to persuade her to buy it. On the other hand, if someone is interested in a beach read, I can give a precis of The Girl in the Photo and, as it happened, sell the book. Patrick found readers interested in The Horse Thieves, and Other Tales of the New West. All in all, I found it a rewarding experience.

Collar Robber: A fast-moving, entertaining mystery

According to Hillary Belle Locke's bio, she graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, worked for a prominent New York law firm, and now practices law in a city far from New York. This background is reflected in her new mystery, Collar Robber and in one of the two protagonists, Cynthia Jakubek who has quit a Wall Street law firm to set up her independent practice in Pittsburgh where her key client wants an annulment so he can marry his true love in the Catholic Church.

Collar Robber's other protagonist is Jay Davidovich, a strapping, six-foot former MP who now works as a Loss Prevention Specialist for a global insurance company. The plot revolves about a scam involving a modern painting worth $50 million—a loss worth preventing.

Locke has published two other mysteries, one starring Jakubek, one starring Davidovich. I suspect that writing those books taught Locke some of the tricks she uses to make Collar Robber so satisfying. It was an inspired decision to put them in the same book. Because their backgrounds, attitudes, experiences, and gender are different (and convincing), and because they are involved with different players in the scam, Locke is able to create scenes and situations she could not have done as easily—or at all—from the point of view of only Jakubek or Davidovich.

Aside from satisfaction of working out the complexities of the case—who's the bad guy? who's innocent? what's this guy's involvement?—I thoroughly enjoyed Locke's writing. Here's Davidovich sitting with his pregnant wife in the OB/GYN waiting room "like some regular guy who worked in an office and didn't encounter thugs and Tasers on the job. What would it be like, having a real office job? Ten-fifteen, time to grab some more coffee! Ooh, quarterly budget report due in three days—pressure-city, baby! No whiffs of electrically burned human flesh. No wondering whether I'd get iced before the tyke in Rachel's womb had his first Little League game or her first Suzuki recital."

Here's Jakubek on her way into court: "I was shouldering my way through a throng of drunks, wife-beaters, hookers, street-hustlers, first-offense (sure) shoplifters, and bar brawlers in the hallway outside Branch 2 of the City of Pittsburgh Municipal Court. I got the 'important' part [of Davidovich's message], but it wasn't as important to me as stalking a client, which is what had brought me to this Hogarthian hallway."

If I have any quibble at all (and what would a review be without a quibble?), I had some trouble keeping straight the names of all the players scattered through the text: Dany Nesselrode, Will Szulz, Proxeine Violet Shifcos, Grace Stannard Dalhousie, Jennifer Stannard Huggens, Sean McGeoghan (pronounced "McGuffin," an unfortunate choice if it makes the reader think of Alfred Hitchcock), Abigail Northanger, Alma von Leuthen, Andy Schuetz, Dan Quindel, Avrim Halkani, and more.

Nevertheless, the writing is so much fun the reader (this reader) is willing to make the effort to follow along. A paragraph like this makes up for a lot: "As he glanced to his left I thought Tally couldn't have looked more astonished if he'd seen ET peddling toward the sky on his bicycle. Couldn't blame him. Clarence Washington, in all of his tiny wispiness, five-feet-nothing and a hundred-twenty pounds soaking wet, was charging forward like a chihuahua with designs on raping a St. Bernard."

I'm not going to tell you what a Collar Robber is because it's key to the mystery. But if you want a fast-moving, entertaining novel starring two interesting characters, read the book to find out.

The Kindle Scout route for writers

Last October, Amazon introduced the Kindle Scout program, a "reader-powered" site for never-before-published books. The site says, "It's a place where readers help decide if a book receives a publishing contract." For writers, it works like this:

You submit your manuscript to Kindle Scout and accept the Submissions & Publishing Agreement. The work has to be complete—edited, copy-edited, with a title and cover image.

You write a one-liner of 45 or fewer characters. Mine is, "Dirty secrets turn deadly in a small town." You write a longer book description of 500 or fewer characters. For example, "It’s 1986, and Tommy Lovell’s dream restaurant has failed, taking his marriage with it. When a family friend asks for help saving his struggling store in a dying Massachusetts town, Tommy tags along with his dad, hoping for a bit of romance and a chance to fly his father’s Cessna. The friend’s midnight motorcycle ride ends in tragedy when he skids off the road. Accident? As father and son uncover theft and deception in the victim’s business, their suspicions put them in unexpected danger."

You submit a photo of yourself, write a short bio, and answer up to three questions like "What is the inspiration for the story?" "Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp?" "Where can readers find out more about you?" The site supplies the questions.

And you provide social links to let readers know where they can learn more about you.

Once the Kindle staff has vetted your submission and you push the button, Kindle posts about 5,000 words and all the marketing material you've submitted. Over the next 30 days, readers (including as many friends and relatives as you can enlist) can nominate your book. At the end of the 30 days, "The Kindle Scout team makes the final call on which books are published by Kindle Press."

Why only 30 days? "We believe that authors should find out quickly if their book will be published through Kindle Press. We think 30 days is enough time for readers to scout new books but short enough so that authors aren't left waiting." Everyone who nominates your book receives a free copy if Kindle does publish it. So what's in it for writers?

Kindle Press authors receive a $1,500 advance and a 50% eBook royalty rate based on the retail price, which Kindle sets. It pays royalties monthly. While Kindle Press acquired worldwide publication rights for eBook and audio formats in all languages, authors retain all other rights—including print rights.

Because the program became active only early this year, there has not been much written about it. Victoria Strauss has a blog post with interesting comments. Katy Waldman wrote a column in Slate dissing one of the first Kindle Scout books, with the implication that quality is going to be an issue for the program. And Neal Wooten has written about his experience.

I am going to try it with my new novel, Death in a Family Business. From what I've been able to learn, the worst that can happen is nothing. The best, of course, is that Kindle Press picks up the book, publicizes it, and readers embrace it. I'll let you know what happens.

Pre-teen boys hide out in a Boston reform school

Aiden Sullivan and Charles Wheeler are 11 and 12 years old in Boston in 1889. Aiden, nominally Catholic, nominally Irish, has no father and a consumptive, dying mother. Charles, an orphan who has already done time for stealing a sandwich, is living by his considerable wits on the streets. They connect early and plausibly in Connie Hertzberg Mayo's fascinating new novel, The Island of Worthy Boys.

Mayo shows the boys' daily scramble to make enough money for food and, in Aiden's case, for rent to keep a tenament roof over his mother and little sister. Desperation finally pushes the boys into rolling drunken sailors on the waterfront, which works until it doesn't. One night, the drunk grabs Charles who has just opened the man's pocket knife, and, in horrible accident, plunges the knife into the man's gut. Worse, a woman happens out of an alley door, spots the boys, and cries havoc. Charles and Aiden now have to get out of Boston, but where?

With the connivance of a friendly whore and an accommodating minister, the boys pass themselves off as orphan brothers and are sent to the Boston Farm School on an island in Boston Harbor. That the school's policy not to accept boys with any kind of criminal record, which Charles has; that there is rampant anti-Irish feeling in Boston in the period, which means Aiden has to watch his accent; and that the school promotes a heavy Protestant Christian ethos to boys guilty of murder makes the island a refuge filled with tripwires.

At the same time, the school offers school, work, shelter, and regular meals. The book's middle section book dramatizes Aiden's and Charles's adjustment to school life as the reader knows this idyll is too good to last. As it is.

The Boston Farm School on Thompson Island in Boston Harbor was a real institution, and Charles Bradley, the superintendent of the school in the book, was in fact the superintendent from 1888 to 1922; his wife Mary was the school's matron. The school was finally closed in 1975.

Mayo has taken the basic factual information about the school and 1889 Boston society to create two engaging 12-year-olds in Aiden and Charles. The novel works so well I think because Mayo is able to evoke the times, the society, and the thought processes of the characters. We see the world through the eyes of Charles, Aiden, and Superintendent Bradley; they are all different, and they are all convincing, given who they are and what they want.

Although the two protagonists of The Island of Worthy Boys are pre-teen, which tends to cast a novel into the YA genre, I believe this is a book adults and young adults can find rewarding. Young people will be interested how Aiden and Charles fill their days in Boston, scrounging for pennies, and at the school, adjusting to life with 98 other boys. Adult readers will be interested in Mayo's evocation of 19th century assumptions about child raising, the era of "As the twig is bent, the tree will grow." Bradley turns out to be an unusually enlightened and kind reform school superintendent. I finished the book pleased and satisfied, and, perhaps more importantly, convinced that the lives Mayo has realized could have truly lived while the drama of their story carried me along.

Joyce Carol Oates's opinions are fascinating

Uncensored: Views & (Re)Views by Joyce Carol Oates is a collection of reviews and essays. It was published in 2005, and the works originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times and elsewhere between 1999 and 2004. The dates, however, are irrelevant. Oates' comments about Sylvia Plath, Willa Cather, Richard Yates, Ernest Hemingway, Balthus, and her reviews of books by William Trevor, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Mary Karr among other are as interesting today as when they were published.

I picked the book up because I was curious to see what Oates had to say about these writers, to see if there are writers I ought to know more about (there are), and to improve my own ability to read and, ideally, to write. What does a working novelist and short story author like Oates have to say? What does she respond to in a book? What does she criticize—or feel does not work?

As a writer of fiction, I think about the challenges. How do you engage a reader? How do you create—invent, devise, fabricate, fashion, build, construct—living characters that are, after all, nothing but words on paper? How do you avoid rupturing the reader's willing suspension of disbelief, throwing her out of the story and tempting her to throw the book across the room?

The only way I know to answer questions like these is to learn what seems to work and what usually doesn't work in fiction. You can, I supposed, learn this on your own, but by doing so you are always limited by your own experiences, your own history, by what you are able to bring to and take from the text. A thoughtful reader like Joyce Carol Oates, with her history and her experience, can add alternative insights, ideas, and perspectives to your own.

One of the book's more interesting essays is "A Garden of Earthly Delights Revisited." Oates wrote the novel in 1965-66 (when she was in her late 20s) and had the opportunity to revise it in 2002. "As a composer can hear music he can't himself play on any instrument, so a young writer may have a vision he or she can't quiet execute; to feel something, however deeply, is not the same as possessing the power—the craft, the skill, the stubborn patience—to translate it into formal terms."

I have not done it (and considering the demands on my time, probably won't do it), but a fascinating exercise would be to compare the 1967 edition of A Garden of Earthly Delights to the 2002 edition. How often is it possible to compare a writer's early version of a novel with her mature edition? If you know of any others, please let me know.

A gay police chief has to solve a small town murder

Stephanie Gayle has attempted a difficult trick and, in my opinion, pulled it off: She has written Idyll Threats entirely in the voice of a gay, former New York homicide detective, Thomas Lynch, now the police chief in bucolic Idyll, Connecticut.

At the beginning of the book, Lynch is profoundly depressed. He has not recovered from the death of his partner and friend in New York City, a shooting that derailed Lynch's career, sending him off to rural Idyll. He's been the town's chief for seven months, seems to have learned almost nothing about

the town ("You could fit what I knew about this town into a shell casing"), has an arm's-length relationship with his officers, and is terrified they will learn he's gay.

One night, Lynch allows himself to be picked up by a local he's stopped for speeding. They go to a shack for their tryst but find it already in use by a young woman and an older man. Lynch's arrival in uniform destroys the couple's mood and his own enthusiasm for quick, uncommitted sex. Everyone heads home, presumably frustrated. The next morning, the local golf course's groundskeeper finds the young woman's body on the 9th green, four bullets in her.

Lynch now has a problem. If he tells his detectives he'd seen the girl shortly before she was killed, he'll have to tell them where and how he'd seen her. In the homophobic world of a small town police station in 1997, this is more than Lynch can face. He has to solve the murder without revealing his involvement.

Gayle can write a lively scene. She has a chapter in which Lynch interviews an elderly, somewhat dotty woman who has seen figures on the golf course the night of the killing. He tries to keep the lady on topic while fending off her horny Pomeranians. It's a hoot (and the information relevant).

She can also write a neat description: "His bare arms were a mosaic of bad tattoos. He even had a dancing hula girl. Her lips were crooked. When I looked closer. I saw that all of her was crooked. He deserved a refund for that tat." Or: "Inside, it looked like a science fair and a yard sale had mated." And: "I couldn't say more [to the parents of the dead girl]. Didn't dare. Hope is a terrible gift. The return policy is heartbreak."

While I had no problem with Lynch's homosexuality, I had a real problem at the beginning of the book with his decision to have sex with the guy he'd stopped for speeding. Chief! Okay, it's been months since you've had sex with anyone, but this is a small town, not New York City! It can only end badly!

As it does. Not only does the visit to the shack hobble the murder investigation (although, to be fair, Lynch could not have imagined that), but the guy he'd gone off with shows up mid-book with a speeding ticket and blackmails Lynch into tearing it up.

Once I had accepted Lynch's flawed judgment, however, I was willing to be carried along by his voice as he deals with past demons and current stresses. By the end of the book, while still unwilling to excuse his actions, I understood why he did what he did. All in all, I thought Idyll Threats an interesting first entry in what promises to be an entertaining series.

Nantucket Five-Spot: An interesting thriller, filled with plausible characters

Nantucket Five-Spot by Steven Axelrod is subtitled "A Henry Kennis Mystery," but it's more thriller than mystery because we know (or should know) at page 14 who the bad guy is. We just have to see how much mayhem he plans to cause on Nantucket island one summer at the height of the tourist season.

Henry Kennis, the narrator, is Nantucket's chief of police. (Axelrod thanks Nantucket Police Chief William Pittnam "for his continuing advice and support.") The book starts with a bang. In the first paragraph, Kennis and Franny Tate, a former love, are having a romantic dinner overlooking Nantucket harbor "when the first bomb went off."

Almost immediately, the island is overrun with state police, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the Joint Terrorism Task Force agents as Kennis and his officers are elbowed aside for crowd control and "support."

Of course, Kennis and his staff know the island and the year-round residents—and the residents know their chief, an important factor. Indeed, Nantucket itself is virtually a character in a book filled with characters, and Axelrod's characters have strong feelings about the island's changing landscape (the second bomb partially destroys a nouveau country club).

As Kennis says about a careless driver, "That's something I hate. People who drive like that. Sometimes I want to arrest everyone—throw them all in jail, impound their cars and their cell phones and their computers and their TVs, and give their stupid McMansions which they use two week a year to the homeless people who need a roof over their heads."

Nantucket Five-Spot is satisfyingly complex with a pulse-raising conclusion. And, perhaps because Axelrod has an MFA in writing from Vermont College, the writing often crackles: "He was a slender man with lots of well-groomed blond hair framing his hawkish face, blue eyes set tight together, sharp nose, thin lips clinched around his indignation, sucking it like a sourball. He spoke with a slight southern accent...." Another example: "For some reason she reminded me of my daughter, soberly explaining that popping all the bubble wrap would make it easier to fit the plastic into the recycling can, when both of us knew she just wanted to do the firecracker dance."

For readers like myself who trip over foreshadowing, the novel did cause me to stumble once or twice: "Just how catastrophically, tragically, fatally bad that choice had been she was going to learn before the end of this close and humid summer day...." And as I wrote a moment ago, the story is complex with wheels within wheels that might put off some readers.

But on balance, I think Nantucket Five-Spot is an interesting thriller, filled with plausible characters, and a plot that edges right up to but never quite tips over into the preposterous.

Why every writer needs an editor

A couple posts ago, I showed a proof copy of my new novel with 22 yellow tabs that marked my editor's queries. This was a proof for a book that had gone through nine drafts, a thorough editing, a spell check, and four exceptionally careful first readers, all of whom found something to question or correct. By the time I uploaded the file to CreateSpace, I was confident the book was entirely clean. I was wrong.

I'm not going to cite all 22 queries, only enough to suggest why every writer needs an editor.

Every yellow tab a query

For example, in the sentence, "She sounded as if she would seriously consider, too...." the context requires an "it" after "consider."

The mystery takes place in 1986. To indicate the time, my narrator looks at a newspaper headline: "Apparent Attempt Made to Kill Indira Gandhi." Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984.

The setting is an appliance/TV retail store and in one place I described the avocado and harvest gold major appliances. By 1986 appliances were almond and white.

In the sentence, "I heard a woman in the stereo console display..." makes it sound as if she'
s part of the display.

A character says, "This business has been a fixture on North Street for more than fifty years...." Fifteen pages later another character uses the identical words. A hundred pages after that, a newspaper article uses the same words. No.

A character is Hanna in one place, Hannah every other place. A character works at Dunkin' Donuts sometimes and at Dunkin Donuts—without the apostrophe—other times. (Dunkin' Donuts is correct.)

The sentence "I figured things weren't going well at the Jonkers..." has one too many words: "the."

The sentence "Are there any any questions?" has one too many "any."

The sentence "Like she made his was too dark" is missing something; it should be, "Like she made his coffee too dark."

Listed like this, these flaws are obvious. Hiding in a 70,000-word book, they're easy to miss. No one of them changes the setting, the characters, or the plot in any way. I believe most readers, caught up in the story, will skip right over them. Some readers, however, will see them and be taken out of the story momentarily—the last thing I want.

I want my readers to be immersed in the story, not distracted by avoidable glitches. And that's why every writer needs an editor.

A simple witness to a satisfyingly complex story

On page 2 of Bob Siqveland's Simple Witness, Jethro Plack—a very bad man—murders a young woman in a Minneapolis parking garage. It's Jethro's bad luck that one Harold Bartz, aka Bandit—not the sharpest tool in the shed—witnesses the killing. Jethro does catch Bandit's truck license number, however, and the game's afoot.

Bandit, smart enough to realize he's in danger but, rather than going to the cops with what he's seen, lights out for Las Vegas. Vegas turns out to be a city of opportunity for Bandit and he induces two other dim Minneapolis friends to join him. But not before the friends inadvertently revealed Bandit's new address to Jethro who sends two Russian hit men clean up his mess. These sections are more like Laurel and Hardy go look for Larry, Moe, and Curly than Raymond Chandler or Elmore Leonard.

Jethro's telemarketing business is a beard for his very lucrative internet scam which announces that You have WON the Fortune Fate Lottery with a £5,250,00 prize. "The notice was official-looking with lots of numbers, references, and instructions." The instructions were signed by Sir George Bedford in London. To claim the prize, the winner had to send £2,460 to "offset costs of processing your winnings, which include all account openings handling, insurance, transfer, and mailing charges."

So while the Minneapolis cops are investigating the murder, a St. Paul cop begins looking into the internet scam. Simple Witness's short chapters move from Minneapolis to Las Vegas to St. Paul to London and back, and they shift in point of view from Jethro to Bandit to Sean O'Dell, a St. Paul police lieutenant, to Tommy Ling, one of Jethro's minions in London. Because the chapters are short and Siqveland's writing is clear, however, the reader is able to follow all the skulduggery.

I thought Simple Witness was unusually entertaining. I also found Bandit and his two friends unconvincing, but I think it's difficult to write convincingly about characters with limited mental abilities. Finally, Jethro Plack is pure, unmitigated evil, and I think that's always a problem. Aside from ripping off gullible Americans who believe they've won a Fortune Fate Lottery, Plack enjoys causing women pain. He's a sicko and, as such, not that interesting as a character. He and the other bad people deserve what happens to them in the end.